When I right click on one of the grab handles (specifically the arrow head of the handle), I thought that was supposed to restrict the movement to one axis. What am I doing wrong if grabbing any arrow head, still permits me to freely move the object in multiple directions?
By default use LMB to select the arrow to restrict to that axis, otherwise with RMB you’re just selecting the object not the manipulator arrow
All the Left mouse button does when I click a grab arrow is relocate the edit cursor. I’ve also tried every combination of Alt, Shift, Ctrl with all 3 mouse buttons. None of that allows me to grab an arrow and restrict the movement. I can of course press “g”, then then “x” if I want to restrict movement to the “x” axis but just grabbing a handle doesn’t seem to work.
Blender’s entire interface is OpenGL, including the parts concerning user interaction. And this also includes determining what part of the interface your mouse hovers over while pressing a button…
You’re not the first to report this behaviour - and all other cases had in common that they were caused by either outdated drivers or an old or very low end graphics card. In other cases changing the selection mode did the trick.
By the way:
The Radeon X550 is what - 10 years old now? With a maximum of only 256 MB VRAM it hardly meets Blender’s current minimum requirements any more.
Yes. My computer is very old. I am running Windows XP and I understand that it’s not supported by Blender anymore. Except for this one issue, everything else does seem to run fine. I can live with this problem until I upgrade my computer someday, if there is no other solution for me.
Thanks for your help.
You could try using older versions of Blender. As far as I recall there was a change in the display code a few versions back, which triggered the behaviour you see now on your machine.
And if your PC is in fact that old, you most likely won’t (be able to) use all the bells and whistles of the latest versions anyway, so…
All previous versions of Blender can be found here. Perhaps start with 2.72 and work your way backwards until you find a version that works flawlessly.
Have you tried “explicitly” telling it to constrain to that axis? With grab, rotate, and scale, you can lock it just by hitting the letter on the keyboard for that axis. A single hit on that key will constrain to the global axis, a double will constrain to the local axis, and a third tap will clear the constraint. I’ve learned to have one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. With the left hand, all 3 are fairly easy to reach (though Y is a little tougher, but not by much).
Yes. I’ve been doing that. See the last sentence in post #3. That all works fine and that’s what I’ll keep doing. Thanks for the suggestion. Not being able to grab handles is a minor problem. I had been wondering if I accidentally made some configuration change or something like that, but it seems to be due to me using an old computer.